Books Give Wine Lovers Comfort and Joy

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, December 16, 1998

This year's crop of wine books, perfect for gift-giving, includes some new titles plus a few revised favorites that keep pace with the constantly changing world of wine.

LEARNING ABOUT WINE

One of the most successful books ever for wine beginners was "Wine for Dummies," by the husband-and- wife wine writing team of Ed McCarthy and Mary Ewing-Mulligan. With 340,000 copies in print, "Dummies" snagged the Georges Duboeuf Wine Book of the Year Award in 1995, a major award for wine writing.

Now the book has been revised, with better-organized text, an updated vintage chart and highlights of new wineries. This easy-to-read reference book reviews hundreds of wines while taking a user-friendly approach to describing wineries, wine regions and winemaking.

Compared to "Wine for Dummies," "Sip by Sip," by Michael Bonadies, is a more personal and technical guide to learning about wine. Bonadies, a New York wine buyer, has created a hybrid manual that combines a textbook approach with snappy writing, humor and insider tips for buying and consuming wine.

The format of "Sip by Sip" is open and breezy, if a little pseudo- hip, with suggested tastings and the usual appendices found in wine self- help guides, such as a vintage chart and how to read a wine label.

For those who want to take the wine thing one step further by making their own, "Home Winemaking," by winemaker Jon Iverson, includes everything from selecting good grapes to tasting oak's contribution to a wine. Iverson discusses making white, red and sparkling wines and, in this second edition, adds a chapter on working with wine concentrates.

The language is understandable for the neophyte winemaker but technical enough for the "advanced amateur." The downside is the book's lack of photographs and charts to support the text.

WINE BUYING GUIDES

Advice on selecting and buying wine is one of the most popular wine-book formats. But all, from pocket guides to encyclopedias, suffer from the same problem: reviewing wines that are out of stock before the book is released. However, that doesn't stop wine readers from buying them as references.

One of the most comprehensive and enduring guides is "The Connoisseurs' Handbook," by Norman Roby and Charles Olken. Now in its fourth edition, it covers wines of California and the Pacific Northwest, with reviews current through September 1998.

Roby and Olken touch all the bases -- basics of winemaking, wine geography, grapes -- then work through miniprofiles of hundreds of California, Washington, Oregon and Idaho wineries. A nice touch is a section in which the authors rate the producers of six popular varietal and sparkling wines.

Smaller and more ambitious is New York wine writer Stephen Tanzer's 1999 wine guide for Food & Wine magazine. Each entry (he includes wines from 10 countries, plus California, Washington and Oregon) gets one or two sentences, but Tanzer provides ratings, price ranges and more. A handy addition is a one-page reference to finding a specific varietal from any of the world's wine regions.

Larger and far more ambitious is the Wine Spectator's latest. Weighing in at 4 pounds, this telephone-directory-size buying guide contains more than 40,000 ratings and descriptions of wines reviewed by the magazine's staff. A new feature lists more than 850 wines costing $12 or less. There's also a pull-out vintage chart and much more.

Perhaps the most prolific wine writer in the world is Oz Clarke, an Englishman with a witty style. Clarke's output this year includes a pocket wine guide and a handbook to fine wine, co-written with fellow wine writer Steven Spurrier.

Their guide covers the same ground but is more comprehensive than Tanzer's, with an A-Z listing of grapes, wines and winemakers. It also provides tips on matching food with wine, a guide to the best vintages plus a handy and informative discourse on modern wine styles.

The "Fine Wine Guide" is billed by the authors as "A Connoisseur's Bible," and it even looks and feels like one. This highly opinionated guide leads the reader through the maze of world wine regions, names and producers. The authors rate the wines, aging potential, entire vintages and more. This book not only leads you by the hand, it virtually tells you which wine to buy and why.

Patrick Matthews, another English wine writer, has taken a different approach to wine reporting with his book on the "unreported wine revolution," a careful look at "a new wave of wine growers who are taking wine back to its roots."

Matthews roams the world, selecting winemakers and grape growers who are getting away from the cookie-cutter approach to winemaking. He places strong stock on Australia and points out Bonny Doon, Edmunds St. John and Peter Michael, among others, as California wineries involved in the revolution. The account reads like a novel with a large international cast of characters. Recommended more for the serious wine collector.

WINE TRAVEL

"A Wine and Food Guide to the Loire" is a labor of love for American writer Jacqueline Friedrich, who examines the more than 60 appellations in the five wine regions of the Loire Valley. But while this is primarily a wine book, she includes a chapter on the foods of the regions, weaving it all into a first-person travelog.

"Oregon Wine Country" is a handsome softcover coffee-table book with stunning scenic color photographs and striking black-and- white cameos of Oregon's winemakers by Robert M. Reynolds. Wine writer Judy Peterson-Nedry provided the text, much of it based on her experiences living in Oregon.

One small annoying omission, especially for those who like things orderly, is the absence of a table of contents or index. But looked at another way, the free-form format encourages the reader to begin looking and reading wherever the book happens to fall open.

WINE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Perhaps no face and name are better known in the wine world than those of California's ambassador of wine, Robert Mondavi. While many of his peers have retired, the indefatigable scion of the Napa Valley wine clan continues, at 85, to realize his dream.

And that's what "Harvests of Joy" is all about. With writer Paul Chutkow, Mondavi takes the reader on the fall-and-rise story, starting in 1965 with the family feud where he was thrown out of the family winery to his rise as one of the most important figures in American wine history.

BOOKS ON BEER

One of the most unsual beer books of the year is a hefty volume that claims beer has been a sacred beverage since ancient times and that the secrets of ancient fermentation of plants and herbs has spiritual healing powers.

"Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers," by Stephen Harrod Buhner, author of other books on plant medicine, provides recipes and documented details on more than 200 plants and herbs used in these ancient beers, their medicinal properties and how they were used as medicine in sacred ceremonies and for food.

More conventional is "Michael Jackson's Great Beers of Belgium," a lavishly illustrated guide to some of the most complex brews in the world. Jackson, an English authority on beer and whisky, has a straightforward style resulting from years of experience. He thoroughly covers Belgium brewing, including the renowned monastic beers, fruit-flavored kriek beers and wonderfully complex lambic beers.